THE study of war has undergone a transformation in the last decade. No longer are academics content to understand conflict through great battles, generals, military strategy and weaponry.

What about the people involved - the armed forces, their loved ones and entire nations that experience physical and environmental destruction, social dislocation, forced exile, and hardship?

That's the core of a groundbreaking MA degree - a world's first - being offered at Manchester University, the flagship programme for its new Centre for the Cultural History of War. The teaching and research unit is being launched by a three-day conference starting a week today involving leading academic authorities from round the globe.

Ana Carden-Coyne, recruited from the University of Sydney to lead the course, expounds unconventional and controversial views - not least that the act of collective remembrance on November 11 is really a way of forgetting the horrific cost of war.

"We have that wonderful Cenotaph by Sir Edward Lutyens in Manchester, with beautiful sleeping dead on the top of it," she says. "But there's an argument that what war monuments do is enable us to have a kind of cultural amnesia.

"They aren't really about remembering, but about institutionalising, forgetting. Because you have these unique monuments where you celebrate remembrance once a year, it enables people to forget for the rest of the time. And to go on making more wars..."

60th anniversary

With the 60th anniversary of D-Day approaching this June, it will become evident that the youngest veterans of the Second World War are now all in their late 70s. So what cultural strands remain that impact on today's Britain?

"As an outsider, I think Britain has an incredible Blitz consciousness," she says. "It's a cultural mythology that has completely shaped the British self-identity.

"It's all about 'we can take it' and `we're all in this together'. But, of course, it's not true at all right now. We are not all in this together. Modern culture is about every man for himself.

"We live in a violent society and it is a society where, if you try to defend another person, you are in danger yourself. So heroism is, in reality, a redundant concept. The police will tell you, `don't have a go'," says Dr Carden-Coyne, daughter of a leading opera singer and an athletics coach.

ALL wars are different, but they impact on the attitudes of people not even born when they were fought. Many Britons' view of our European partners is shaped by the country "standing alone" during the Second World War.

It's part of the Australian psyche that they believe - quite wrongly - that the ANZACs were the only Allied troops fighting in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and that only the Aussies offered any resistance to the Japanese advance towards Singapore in 1942.

The Americans, "over-paid, over-sexed and over here" - and of course, late - retort that we would all be speaking German had they not arrived.

She worries that politicians are able to manipulate such emotions.

"We need to empathise more with others. Governments would like us to believe that recovery from war is a self-generated kind of thing. That's why the stories need to be told. That's why people need the confidence to be able to tell them.

"It's very often the case that people who have experienced - or even perpetrated - the extreme trauma of war, say nothing. It's part of the survival instinct to absolutely bury it. Sometimes society collaborates with that silence.

"Look how the Vietnam War veterans were shunned when America chose to look the other way. But that runs the risk of us becoming a passive people.

"It's the job of scholars to get people to ask the right questions and be persistent in getting people to tell of their experiences."

DR Carden-Coyne's MA students will also forge close links with the Imperial War Museum North and some of their work - including films, a key component of the course - could be exhibited there as early as 2005.

Appetite

Whether the telling and recording of stories could stem the appetite for war is open to debate, she acknowledges.

The late 1920s and 1930s saw what she describes as an "amazing" flowering of literature, poetry, art and drama based on memoirs of the Great War.

One of the most gripping of all was Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, the harrowing story of young German soldiers, school-friends, killed one by one in the trenches.

A year later it was made into the first and perhaps most compelling anti-war film ever produced.

But two years after its release, Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor.